BRLTTY in Chrome OS

We typically ship with a stable release build of BRLTTY plus some cherry-picked patches.

Updating BRLTTY or adding a patch

First, follow the public Chromium OS Developer Guide to check out the source. At a minimum you'll need to create a chroot. You do not need to build everything from source. You do need to start the devserver.

Next, flash your device to a very recent test build. Internally at Google you can do this with the following command when the dev server is running, where CHROMEBOOK_IP_ADDRESS is the IP address of your Chromebook already in developer mode, and $BOARD is your Chromebook's board name.

The first thing you‘ll need to do is edit the ebuild symlink to change the revision number. The real file is something like brltty-5.4.ebuild, but the revision will be something like brltty-5.4-r5.ebuild. You’ll need to increment it.

Upload the latest stable release of brltty.

Upreving

Next, you will need to uprev the ebuild. Do this by renaming all files from the previous version to the new one. E.g. Brltty-5.4.ebuild -> brltty-5.6.ebuild

Note: Manifest has various checksums computed based on the release you uploaded to GCS. Each of these will need to be replaced/updated.

This should be enough to kick off a build. It is likely patches won’t apply cleanly. Apply patches It is often much easier to apply patches to your local checkout of brltty from github, an build there.

git tags

Will ensure you find the right release. You can then checkout that release via

Git checkout tags/<tag_name>

Testing

Once you have a build deployed on a machine, here are a few useful things to check: